David Carr

Earl Wilson/The New York Times

David Carr, who wrote about media as it intersects with business, culture and government in his Media Equation column for The New York Times, died at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital on Feb. 12, 2015. He was 58.

For the past 25 years, Carr wrote about media as it intersects with business, culture and government.

He began working at the Times in 2002 covering the magazine publishing industry for the Business section. Prior to joining the Times, Carr was a contributing writer for The Atlantic Monthly and New York Magazine. In 2000, he was the media writer for Inside.com, a web news site focusing on the business of entertainment and publishing.

Before coming to New York, Carr served as editor of the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly in Washington D.C. for five years. From 1993 to 1995, Carr was editor of the Twin Cities Reader, a Minneapolis-based alternative weekly, and wrote a media column there as well.

On August 5, 2008, Carr’s book, “The Night of the Gun,” came out on Simon and Schuster. The book is a memoir of addiction and recovery that used reporting to fact check the past. Much of the data he collected, including videos, documents and pictures, is available here. (If you want to purchase the book, you can go here.)

Carr lived in Montclair, N.J., with Jill Rooney Carr, and had three children.

What if I told you I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke? Now what if I said that I was a recovered crack addict who got custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare and raised them? Both are the story of my life.

Mr. Carr, who died Thursday, was a funny, demanding, optimistic teacher of reporters-to-be at Boston University, and his syllabus distills his sense of an unfolding digital age. Excerpts here serve as the final Media Equation column under his byline.